The Azim Premji-led soaps to software firm Wipro, has now developed a hardware product that can improve the power generation in a solar plant by as much as 20%. Wipro says it’s a first-of-its-kind product in the world. Wipro has already bagged two orders for the product and has started piloting it with one company during the September quarter.
The product, developed by a team of 40, picks up critical data from panels and inverters in a solar plant and dynamically models it to improve generation. Wipro is guaranteeing between 8% and 20% generation increase in a plant. The product has both hardware and software components. ?It is a box that sits in a customer location that picks up the data for modeling. Both the hardware and software have been developed by us,? president of Wipro’s eco-energy business TK Kurien said.
?It would be sold on a licensing model. Right now, we are doing trials in India. In about six months’ time, we would be able to take this global,? Kurien said. The firm will partner developers, system integrators and engineering procurement and contracting players to take the product global.
?There is no other product in the world that can give you analytics in real time and improve generation. Right now it is only solar. Next we will go to wind and then a whole bunch of other things,? Kurien said, indicating more products are in the pipeline. A one megawatt solar plant would require one of these boxes. At a mature stage after implementation, the product can handle 80% of the transactions without human intervention, he said.
The amount of electricity generated from a plant is a critical issue for the solar industry as generation usually depends on the location of the plant. In a place of higher solar radiation like Rajasthan, a one megawatt plant can generate 1.6 million to 1.7 million units per annum, far higher than in Eastern India.
A solar industry expert who did not want to be named said a solar plant has a lot of electronics and IT-enabled solutions can extract more juice out of the components to make them work more coherently and efficiently. Higher generation from a plant may eventually translate to lower costs per watt. The product is a result of a restructuring in the firm?s EcoEnergy business, carried out over the past few months. The firm has moved from a asset-heavy model. The earlier focus was to build green infrastructure ? green roads, green buildings, green bridges. It would have been a low margins business of between 5% and 7%. The company would now focus around services like consulting and products. The firm has invested in people designing solar plants and green buildings for the services business.
As with any new product, most other details like market size and potential remain shrouded in mystery, but the solar segment has only seen growing interest as the demand for cleaner energy gains momentum outside of Europe, traditional leaders. Experts anticipate larger numbers of multi- megawatt solar installations in the coming years. Market research firm iSuppli expects the global photovoltaic market in 2011 to show robust growth, with installations rising by 42% for the year to 20.2 Gigawatts from 14.2GW at the end of 2010.